How Many Birds Is That? - eBird

Until about a month ago we never kept track of the birds that we have seen or heard. We knew that we had seen and photographed a lot of birds but there was never a reason or desire to keep a list, and then we watched a movie called “The Big Year” starring Steve Martin, Jack Black and Owen Wilson .

Curious, I wondered exactly how many birds we had seen since becoming official bird nerds on January 1, 2016 so I went about spending numerous hours creating an Excel spreadsheet with sighting dates from my photographs metadata and included the 4-letter alpha code for every bird using an Institute for Bird Populations publication by Peter Pye and David F. DeSante. Further tweaking of our list included the location of many of the birds first sighting and gave them “lifer” designations for the ones that we could confirm by date. I then started to amend the list by adding future sighting dates so that we could track species migration patterns of “our crew” that visit the feeders in the yard. I was so proud of what we had accomplished thinking that we were on to something by keeping a list of birds like this. This must be what being a true birder was all about!

On our recent birding excursion to the George C. Reifel Migratory Bird Sanctuary in Delta, BC we used Rite in the Rain notebooks to record the species including the number seen and I updated the Excel spreadsheet (that I had pre-loaded into the cloud) on my iPhone while on the ferry back home. After finishing our third excursion to the buffet and while Googling for bird checklists we happened to stumble on a free app called eBird. Quickly we downloaded the app and fumbled through the mobile interface trying to understand how to use it and even more, why we would want to use it! 

Over the next couple of days, we both completed the free on-line Cornell Lab eBird Essentials course, but I still had one concern. Would we spend more time looking at our iPhone's in the field than looking for birds? The eBird app looked great but would it be practical in the field?

Our first field testing of eBird included using notepads to record our sightings and then we entered the data into eBird once back in the car or leaving a habitat. I timed this process and found on average it took less than 3 minutes to complete a checklist, but could the whole process be streamlined further? The last few weeks we have recorded our sightings in eBird as they were discovered, and we noticed that we are now seeing more species than we normally would have because how we bird has also changed. Now we find ourselves stopping in a habitat for a few minutes to observe the “what’s that?” and are seeing other species that in the past we would have missed.

Not only have we found that the mobile eBird app is very easy to use after completing the eBird Essentials course, but the free Merlin Bird ID app can also be directly accessed while using eBird, eliminating the need to carry printed field guides. It gets even better because the app checklists sync with the eBird website and this is where the data is shared with other eBird users all around the world. There are so many great features and reasons to use eBird and if you haven’t it might be worth looking at for yourself.

Not that we are interested birding by numbers however currently there are 10,417 species worldwide in the eBird database and Robyn and I have 142 and 143 lifers respectively (I’ve seen a Barn Owl) which works out that we have seen 1.37% of all worldwide species. This only means one thing …. Time to get birding!!!